The Brain-Powered Robot Servant: Resident Roboticist

I once spent months training a stubborn computer to recognize both my American-accented speech and that of my Australian housemate. The computer always failed because our speech patterns were so different. Clearly, speech isn't the most efficient way to order around computers, much less robot servants. Brain waves, however, don't have accents. Researchers at the University of Washington's Laboratory for Neural Systems have built a humanoid robot, called Morpheus, that can be controlled by thought alone. According to project leader Rajesh Rao, "In essence, the robot becomes an extension of your own body."

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This isn't the first foray into brain-operated machines. Noninvasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been around since the 1970s, typically using electrodes to collect scalp measurements of brain activity, called electroencephalograms (EEGs). Over the course of weeks or months, subjects in past research projects have painstakingly learned to tailor their thoughts to perform simple tasks such as moving computer cursors. Invasive surgical implants developed in recent years for use by paraplegics have been more efficient, but a system that requires brain surgery has some obvious drawbacks.

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Rao's team set out to discover whether an EEG-based BCI could be pushed further -- to control the 2-ft.-tall, partially autonomous Morpheus. (His friends call him "Mo.") Donning a cap studded with 32 electrodes, subjects watch a television screen showing the view from Mo's two camera-eyes. The little manbot can be commanded to do one of two things: Walk to a certain location or pick up a Styrofoam block. The cap continuously collects EEGs and transmits the data to a machine-learning algorithm that has already learned the correspondence between the subject's thought patterns and commands in a separate training process. This usually takes only 5 to 10 minutes. Once the robot has learned to read your mind, it simply does what it's told.

In experiments so far, nine subjects were able to direct the robot to move to a location, pick up a block, and then return. The average lag between human concentration and robot action was 5 to 10 seconds; the goal is to control the robot almost unconsciously, with commands executed in a few milliseconds -- the speed of thought.

Near instantaneous control of a robot sounds a bit scary. If you were to think, "My dishes are ugly," would your eager domestic robot toss them out the window? In fact, there's no way to take back a command once Morpheus gets started. Never fear, Rao says: "The more critical the task, the more safeguards we will add."

A researcher at the University of Washington wears an electrode cap to control Morpheus. The 2-ft.-tall robot cycles through a set of commands, stopping on whichever one the cap-wearer is thinking about.